10 Incredible Facts You Didn't Know About Netflix
4. Netflix Analyses EVERYTHING
When House of Cards was launched in 2013, it really felt like there must have been some very creative executives at Netflix who really had their finegr on the pulse of the times. In 2013 prestige television like Mad Men and Breaking Bad was really at its peak, and the decision to green light a David Fincher directed, Kevin Spacey-starring political drama that you could binge watch, seemed like a game changer.
And this makes sense because they did know. But it wasn't intuition, or a selection of executives that really cared about television. It was because Netflix analyses just about everything, and then uses these terabytes of data to tailor every little aspect of the service in an almost obsessive compulsive manner.
House of Cards wasn't luck, it came from watching what Netflix users watched, how they watched, and how long they watched for. Given the nature of its business and its enormous customer base, Netflix is able to analyse their content in a way that no other old media entity has ever come close to.
Pausing Family Guy to make a sandwich? Netflix won't just make a note of that pause, but it will make a note of how long you pause for, and whether or not you complete the show after the pause, or if indeed the sandwich put you more in the mood for The Square.
Did you start a new series of Longmire but decided it wasn't your cup of tea? Netflix has algorithms that analyse exactly when you stopped watching and will compare against every other person that watched the show to see how many more seasons there are. Netflix is a mathematicians fantasy, and a paranoid conspiraloons worst Orwellian nightmare.